4 Reasons Why You should Repurpose Your Business Articles or Blog Posts

If you have a business blog into which you regularly contribute, chances are that you already have a good repository of articles related to your industry or business. You must have noticed that some of your articles are performing well while others could not make much impact.

Now you are faced with two important questions. Firstly, how do you make the already-performing articles reach a wider audience? Secondly, how do you improve the traffic of those underperforming, yet good articles?

Killing two birds with one stone

My answer to these two questions is this – repurpose your articles in a creative and effective way. Repurposing articles is like killing two birds with one stone. It helps you take your well-performing articles to a wider, or perhaps different, readership while those less noticed and less read articles get a chance to perform better.

article repurposing

Repurposing articles – what it is NOT?

Before getting into the benefits of repurposing articles, blogs or any other form of online content, let me explain what does repurposing of articles mean, and more importantly, what does it entail.

A better beginning point would be to see what it is not. Creating a “new” article by randomly picking one of your old articles, recycling it by adding a sentence or two here and there? No. Giving it a new flavor by rephrasing paragraphs and substituting words with synonyms? No. Rewriting an old article word by word? No. No. No. None of these would qualify for the term “repurposing”. Repurposing is not recycling; it is not rephrasing either.

Repurposing articles – what is it?

Repurposing of articles or blog posts, as the name suggests, mean that you are to reshape them to meet a new purpose. And this new purpose, more often than not, involves a transformation in the structure and form.

In other words, the process involves changing the form and format of an article or blog post to the effect of catering to a wider or different group of readers. Visually representing an already published article, in the form of an infographic, for instance, can be called repurposing.

What are the benefits of repurposing your articles?

An increase in the number of posts is not what you should aim to achieve by repurposing your existing content or articles; it comes as a natural corollary though. Repurposing articles has a number of benefits. Here are four of them:

  1. Reap the benefits of your research

article writing tipsEight years into content writing industry, I can say one thing with absolute certainty: writing good articles requires tremendous research. But sometimes, it so happens that you spend long hours for doing research only to write a 600 worded article. That doesn’t sound just, does it?

Repurposing is the best way to put your researched data into use – by creating different forms of content using the same data. This will also help you determine which data should go into which form, thereby enhancing the appeal of your online content.

  1. Maximum utilization of your unique article ideas

Writers, business owners and social media marketers would agree with me that the hardest part of writing articles is to find fresh topics and perspectives. Had there been something called an all-seasonal idea-bearing tree, we all would have grown it in our backyards; but sadly, there is no such tree. So, wouldn’t it make sense to re-generate different forms of content from the articles you have already written?

When you transform an already written article or blog post into an infographic or motion graphic, you are reaching out to different kinds of audience. When you repurpose a series of old articles into an e-book, for instance, you may find fresh perspectives or ideas to write new articles.

  1. Reach a wider audience

repurposing articles As mentioned above, repurposing your web content, be it articles or blog posts, is the best way to appeal to a wider audience. For instance, let us imagine that your blog has three types of potential readers:

The first group is information savvy and is looking for advanced information. The best type of content you can use to reach them is infographic as it is an advanced level representation of data. You can convert one of your already written articles into an infographic or create fresh ones to tap this target group.

Then there is the second kind. They are not really keen about the rules and nuances of content writing or Google’s algorithm. For them, information, in its entirety, does the job. They like to read lengthy articles; they don’t mind videos and infographics either. So we need to produce elaborately written articles or blogs for this target audience.

And there are readers who fall into the beginners’ category. For them, you can repurpose your articles or blogs into slides or user guides.

  1. Better traffic and SEO

When you write an article for the second category, try to repurpose it for the first and third groups. This way, you can bring more targeted traffic to your onsite blog. We all know that search engine algorithms consider freshness factor while ranking an article or a post. So repurposing the same researched data from different perspectives and into different media is your way to impress search engines. Also when you have an article in a different format you can interlink the content encouraging more interaction from the readers.

Thus, changing the format and perspective of your blog posts can bring more mileage to your content as well as your business. There are many ways and tools to help you repurpose your website content. We will discuss this in detail in one of the coming blogs.

Ambika Indira
Ambika Indira is one of the co-founders and the Managing Director of Coffeegraphy. She specializes in online content and SEO. She is a rigorous observer of the trends and changes happening in online content industry.

